When I Was A Donk: With Brian Altman

In this series, Card Player asks top pros to rewind back to their humble beginnings and provide insights regarding the mistakes, leaks, and deficiencies that they had to overcome in order to improve their games.

Brian Altman is a Boston, Massachusetts poker pro who broke through in February in 2015 by winning the WPT Lucky Hearts Poker Open for $723,008. Since then, he’s gone on to make two more World Poker Tour final tables, and score numerous other titles along the way. Altman has wins at the Asia Championship of Poker, Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open, Foxwoods Poker Classic, Foxwoods Mega Stack Challenge, Ante Up Poker Tournament, and Venetian Deepstack Extravaganza.

He also owns a World Series of Poker Circuit ring, having won the Montreal main event in 2016 for $201,411. Most recently, Altman added another $297,020 to his tournament resume by finishing sixth in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event. In total, he has racked up more than $3.2 million in live tournament earnings.

Here, Altman talks about one of his early leaks.

“I think in general, I was playing too many hands. Early on in my career, I would just be in way too many pots. You can get away with that for a little while if you are aggressive enough, but eventually you learn that you don’t have to play every suited connector, any two Broadway cards, or just random ace-x hands.”

“Even worse, I would get attached to my hands after the flop. Any time I would get dealt a big pair, I was doing everything I could to see a showdown. It didn’t matter how many bets somebody put in on that 7-5-6 suited flop, I would call down with my overpair and then complain about getting unlucky. I had no fold button whatsoever. Or I would play them faster so I wouldn’t get cracked, and lose out on value.”

“So, learning about things like board texture really helped me. The fact that the board could change the relative strength of your hand, and how some flops are much better for your hand than others. I learned through trial and error, but it eventually got through, how to control the pot size.”

“The other side of things is that now I’m much more aware of this type of play in others. Depending on the board, and the opponent, I might try and push someone off of a big pair, or I might know how to get maximum value when I have the best hand.”

“The structure of the event, and where it’s taking place, also factors in. If it’s the early stages of a re-entry tournament, or it’s summer in Las Vegas and there are other events to play, I’m less concerned about getting a big pair cracked. But if I’m traveling to play in an event and that’s my only option, I might decide to take the lower variance approach.” ♠